Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Stereotype in Fernndez
de Oviedos Historia general
y natural de las Indias
Colonial Discourse and the Caribbean Areto
G A L E N B R O K AW
State University of New York at Buffalo
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and obsolete. From the rst pages of the Historia, Oviedo explains that he
will imitate Pliny (1992, 13). Also from the beginning, however, he points
out Plinys errors and how their works differ because of the nature of the
subject matter: Pliny writes of the Old World; Oviedo confronts the New.
When Oviedo writes of things never before heard of or seen, he is venturing into methodologically unstable territory because he has no textual support. When it happens that old and new appear to coincide, tradition
compels Oviedo to cite Pliny as an authority, but he also subverts the
authority of ancient texts by relying on his own observation and personal
experiences to justify the portions of his text for which he cannot provide
authoritative support.
One of the best examples of this methodological ambivalence occurs in
chapter 5, book 6 of the rst volume of the Historia. Oviedo explains how
the Indians start res by rubbing sticks together. He cites Pliny and Vitrubio
as support for his description:
Quien hobiere ledo, no se maravillar destos secretos, porque muchos dellos hallarn escriptos, o sus semejantes. Esto, a lo menos, del sacar fuego de
los palos, pnelo Plinio en su Natural Historia. . . . Dice Vitrubio que los
rboles por tempestad derribados, e entre si mismo fregndose los ramos,
excitaron el fuego e levantaron llamas. . . .
[Whosoever has read, will not marvel at these secrets, because many of
them are found written, or their semblances. This, at least, about making
re from sticks, Pliny includes in his Natural History. . . . Vitrubio says that
the trees knocked over by storms, and whose branches rub together, created
re and raised ames. . . .] (i, 15051)
Oviedos phrase a lo menos [at least] implies at once relief that in this
case his text can comply with traditional scholarship and regret that he can
provide no authority for other elements of his text. Immediately, however,
in a moment of textual schizophrenia, Oviedo undermines his own traditional methodology:
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The textual, linguistic enterprise of this intellectual conquest has a formal, rhetorical dimension that dramatizes and lays bare the colonial nature
not only of Oviedos text but also of language in general. The early colonial
discourse of explorers, conquistadors, and historians deals with the problem of representing or semiotically conquering the new in various ways.
Elsewhere I identify what I call strategies of avoidance that rely upon
rhetorical topoi to avoid substantive representation of New World nature.
The representation of cultural phenomena, however, is more complicated
and leads to more sophisticated solutions in colonial texts. In The Writing of
History, Michel de Certeau (1988) argues that historiographic and ethnographic discourse reveals as much, or more, about the representer as it does
about the represented. This ambivalence of colonial discourse, caught
between representation of the other and representation of the self, involves
a series of complex discursive strategies carried out within the text. Oviedos
representation of the indigenous areto exhibits this ambivalence and relates
directly to what Homi Bhabha calls colonial mimicry: the desire for a
reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same,
but not quite (1994, 86, emphasis in original). Bhabha explains that [t]he
authority of that mode of colonial discourse . . . called mimicry is . . . stricken
by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference
that is itself a process of disavowal (86). Oviedos text achieves this mimicry through a series of discursive operations that fall within two general
processes: (1) the establishment of a relationship of resemblance or analogy
between indigenous and European cultural phenomena based on a perceived cultural common denominator; and (2) the supplementation of this
common denominator with Spanish referents that then displace the unique
cultural signicance of the indigenous signs.
In the rst chapter of the fth book of the Historia, Oviedo explains that
he has very carefully inquired into and studied the ways in which indigenous American societies maintained records of their past. On the island of
Hispaniola, he identies the indigenous tradition known as the areto as the
means by which knowledge is passed down from generation to generation
(1992, 125). Oviedo introduces the areto by briey explaining its function
and the activities that constitute its performance:
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Tenian estas gentes una buena e gentil manera de memorar las cosas pasadas
e antiguas; y esto era en sus cantares e bailes, que ellos llaman areito, que es
lo mismo que nosotros llamamos bailar cantando. . . . El cual areito hacan
desta manera: . . . tombanse de las manos . . . e uno dellos tomaba el ocio
de guiar (ora fuese hombre o mujer), y aqul daba ciertos pasos adelante e
atrs, a manera de un contraps muy ordenado, e lo mismo, y en el instante,
hacen todos, e as andan en torno, cantando en aquel tono alto o bajo que la
gua los entona, e como lo hace e dice, muy medida e concertada la cuenta
de los pasos con los versos o palabras que cantan.
[These people had a good and noble manner of remembering things past
and ancient; and this was with their songs and dances, which they call areto,
which is the same thing that we call singing dance. . . . They performed this
areto in the following way: . . . they took each others hands . . . and one of
them played the part of guide (whether woman or man), and that person
took certain steps forward and backward, like a very orderly contraps, and
immediately following everyone else does the same, and in this way they
took turns, singing in a high or low tone according to what the guide
intones, and according to what he does and says, very measured and coordinated the step count with the verses or words that they sing.] (i, 113)
In this brief introduction, the relationship between the Tano and Spanish
signiers and cultural traditionsareto on the one hand and romance, cantar, baile, and contraps on the otheralready reveals the ambivalence that
appears throughout Oviedos treatment of indigenous culture. Oviedo
asserts equivalence while at the same carefully documenting the cultural
difference of the Caribbean practice.
One of the premises upon which I base my discussion of Oviedos representation is that no matter what common human roots dance and song
may have, there was a drastic difference between the Spanish and indigenous Caribbean versions of these cultural phenomena. I would argue further that difference dominated the entire relationship between Spanish and
American culture. This difference troubles the discourse of Oviedos text, a
difference that compels him to use indigenous terms extensively. If there
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The text repeatedly insists on the equivalence of the areto and the Spanish
romance, but the ethnographic description of this indigenous tradition and
the persistent use of the indigenous term itself maintain an ambivalent difference that is characteristic of colonial mimicry, a discourse constructed
around an ambivalence . . . [that] must continually produce its slippage, its
excess, its difference (Bhabha 1994, 86; emphasis in original). Oviedos
treatment of the areto and other indigenous concepts portrays Amerindian
customs as culturally equivalent to those of Spain, but the discursive
processes that establish relationships of similitude undermine this claim.
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These relationships of similitude lead to the juxtaposition and then substitution of Spanish and indigenous signiers and referents. At the beginning of the chapter on the areto, Oviedo identies his subject as sus
cantares [their songs] adding an aside that provides the indigenous term:
que ellos llaman areitos [which they call aretos] (I, 112). When he begins
his discussion of the indigenous custom, Oviedo inverts this order:
Pasemos a los areitos o cantares suyos [Let us pass to the aretos or songs]
(I, 113). Here he combines the two terms with the indigenous signier in the
rst position and the Spanish term as an aside. Immediately thereafter, he
inverts the order again: sus cantares e bailes, que ellos llaman areito [their
songs and dances, which they call areto] (I, 113). Further on, in the same
paragraph, he once again changes the order: areitos o cantares en corro
destos indios In the next paragraph, Oviedo uses the Spanish cantar twice
by itself to refer to the areto, and once again in the following paragraph.
Thus, the Spanish term completely displaces the indigenous signier, albeit
briey, and appropriates its referent. Cantar here becomes areto.
Later, the text establishes an analogical relationship between the areto
and the Spanish romance or ballad, and the exact same process occurs but in
reverse: in this case the indigenous term appropriates the Spanish referent.
Speaking of a specic romance, Oviedo writes:
As lo dice un romane, y en la verdad as fue ello: que desde Sevilla parti
el Rey don Alonso Oneno, quando la gan, a veynte e ocho de marzo, ao
de mill e trescientos e quarenta e quatro aos. As que ha, en este de mill e
quinientos e quarenta e ocho, doscientos e quatro aos que tura este cantar
o areito.
[Thus sayeth a ballad, and in truth thus it was: that from Seville departed
King Alonso XI, when he conquered it on the twenty-eighth of March in the
year one thousand three hundred and forty-four years. Thus there are, in
this year of one thousand ve hundred and forty-eight, two hundred and
four years that this song or areto covers.] (i, 114)
As before, he begins by using both terms with the Spanish signier occupying the initial position and the indigenous term as an aside, but here the
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referent is not the areto but rather the Spanish romance. Next, he inverts
the position of the signiers while speaking of another romance: por manera que ha bien seiscientos doce aos, este de mill e quinientos e quarenta e
siete, que tura este otro areito o cantar en Espaa [thus there are six hundred and twelve years, this being 1547, that this areto or ballad in Spain covers] (I, 115). Here, as before, the terms are inverted with the indigenous
term occupying the initial position and the Spanish term as an aside.
Finally, inverting the pattern established earlier, Oviedo employs the
indigenous term by itself to refer to the Spanish romance:
As que, cantar o areito es aqueste, que ni en las historias se olvidar tan gloriosa jornada para los trofeos y triunfos de Csar y de sus espaoles, ni los
nios e viejos dejarn de cantar semejante areito, quanto el mundo fuere e
turare.
[Thus, this is a song or areto, that such a glorious expedition for the trophies and triumphs of Caesar and his Spaniards will never be forgotten in
the histories, nor will the children and the old ever cease to sing such aretos for as long as the world lasts.] (i, 115)
At the beginning of this passage, the two signiers appear together, but
then, incredibly, the indigenous term displaces the Spanish signier, and by
way of the common denominator of song comes to signify, albeit eetingly,
the Spanish romance.
On the formal level of the text itself, these processes loosen the cultural
rigidity of the Tano and Spanish signs, creating an indeterminacy that
allows them to swap signiers and referents. This game of musical
signiers forms part of a complex process through which Oviedos text
transforms resemblance into colonial mimicry. Bhabhas version of mimicry is the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which appropriates the Other as it visualizes
power (1994, 86). Bhabha claries this concept by explaining John Lockes
subtle polysemic use of the term slave: rst as the locus of a legitimate
form of ownership, then as the trope for an intolerable, illegitimate exercise
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of power (86). The double articulation in Oviedo is not based on the polysemic use of a signier as in Lockes use of the term slave, but rather on
the ostensibly polyglot nature of the referent. Rather than dealing with one
signier and two referents, the text introduces several Spanish terms (cantar, baile, and romance) and one indigenous term (areto), all of which speciously come to share a single referent. The ambivalent slippage occurs in
the play of difference and similitude between the terms of the two languages as well as between the indigenous and European referents.
As with any cultural phenomenon, linguistic terms rely on a metonymic
process that relates denoted activities or concepts to connoted cultural
signicance. According to Oviedo, the indigenous term areto and the
Spanish terms cantar, baile, romance, and even historia all share a common
denotation, but the fact that the text requires four Spanish signiers in its
attempt to convey the meaning of the areto belies this assertion and suggests that the cultural connotation also differs. The metonymy that connects denotation to connotation is a weak link that colonial discourse
exploits in order to transform resemblance into mimicry through a process
of what we might calladapting Derridas termsupplementation.
Derrida explains that what is supplementary is in reality differance, the
operation of differing which at one and the same time both ssures and
retards presence, submitting it simultaneously to primordial division and
delay. . . . The supplementary difference vicariously stands in for presence
due to its primordial self-deciency (1973, 88). For Derrida, the prime
example of this phenomenon is writing, which supplements speech by taking its place and pretending to be that which it is not. In Oviedos text, this
is precisely what happens with the indigenous and Spanish signiers and
referents. The signiers and their explanations in the text explicitly or
implicitly make evident four elements: (1) the denotation of the Spanish
signiers cantar, baile, romance, and historia; (2) the Spanish cultural connotation of the activities and products associated with these terms; (3) the
denotation of the Tano term areto; and (4) the Tano cultural connotation
invoked by the activities and products associated with this term. The establishment of a resemblance between the areto and Spanish traditions
reduces these elements to three by equating the indigenous and Spanish
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Of course, the dialogue is not a direct transcription of the actual conversation, and Oviedo is not above putting words into the mouths of his sources.
The dialogue was a rhetorical convention, not a tool of empirical research.
This dialogue does provide us with a Nahuatl signier, mitote, but the text
equates it with the areto and makes no cultural distinction between the
two. In this case, the Tano referent, already displaced by the Spanish, displaces the Nahua cultural concept of mitote. Later on in the text, Oviedo
again uses the term areito to refer to a Nicaraguan tradition of song and
dance (IV, 365). By way of the speciously xed Tano sign areto, Oviedo
stereotypes all indigenous American traditions of song and dance, recasting in the image of European culture.
In La msica y los aretos de los indios de Cuba, Fernando Ortiz (1948)
explains that the term areto originally had only Antillean signicance, but
that as the conquest expanded throughout other parts of America, the
Spanish applied it to other indigenous phenomena. The term became so
standardized that it appears even today in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish
Academy [Diccionario de la Real Academia Espaola].5 Donald Thompson
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traces the manifestations of the areto in several colonial texts and observes
that to writers seeking order and reason in the New World, locally specic
observations very easily became a part of broad generalizations. As a result
it has been believed, without supporting evidence of any kind, that precisely the same kind of activity, the areto, was practiced throughout the
entire region (1993, 187). In the case of Europeans, the problem we are
dealing with here is not merely textual but also cognitive. We might amend
Thompsons statement to read Anyone seeking order and reason, for even
though we only have access to the discourse of those who wrote, the
American experience compelled all Europeans, mestizos, and other indigenous Americans as well to impose a symbolic order on American reality.
The textual manifestation of stereotyped indigenous culture is based on the
same phenomenon occurring in day-to-day Spanish popular perception.
Of course, the tradition of textual authority led those who recorded the
new American reality to rely heavily on previous writings, thus distorting
even further the cultural referents that they were attempting to represent.
For later chroniclersespecially mestizo and indigenous writersthe
use of terms originally foreign to the culture being represented do not indicate the same processes of displacement and stereotyping but rather the
hegemony of semiotic conventions. Several decades after Oviedo wrote his
description of the Caribbean areto, the Mexican chronicler Hernando
Alvarado Tezozomoc describes pre-Hispanic indigenous nobles from central Mexico engaging in el areito y el mitote con mucha vocera (1975,
592), but his discourse is not troubled by the same ambivalence. The
Nahuatl term mitote, mentioned by Cano in Oviedos dialogue, appears in
Tezozomocs text following the Caribbean term areto, but there is no indication of semiotic tension between signiers and referents. In Peru as well,
in El seoro de los Incas, Pedro Cieza de Len augments the Quechua term
taqui with areyto to refer to an indigenous Andean tradition of song and
dance: Y besando, hicieron reverencia al sol y hicieron un gran taqui y
areyto (1985, 136) [And kissing, they gave reverence to the sun and performed a great taqui and areto]. The fact that Tezozomoc and Cieza de Len
do not struggle to justify their use of the Caribbean term suggests that it had
acquired common usage in Mexico and Peru to refer to native practices of
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song and dance.6 This widespread use of the term to refer to traditions from
various Amerindian cultures fosters a reverse stereotype in which indigenous and/or mestizo writers like Tezozomoc unwittingly displace the original referents of signiers like areto not with Spanish referents, as in
Oviedo, but rather with their own indigenous cultural referents such as the
activities associated with the mitote.
This semiotic economy of early colonial historiographic description
involves different processes and effects depending upon the identity and
position of the producer and receptor of a text. Oviedos description could
not have reproduced in the minds of his European readers the same cognitive processes of analogy and assimilation that informed the production of
his linguistic descriptions of indigenous culture. Oviedos writing reveals
the semiotic tension and the processes of colonial mimicry and stereotyping rooted in his material experience of the Caribbean, but European readers without this experience would only have been able to extract the nal
product. The same is true of indigenous, mestizo, and European readers
from other parts of the Americas. Texts by writers from non-Caribbean
areas that employ terms whose referents have already been stereotyped
(such as the areto) perpetuate the process but in different ways. In Mexico
and Central America, for example, the referent of the indigenous term
mitote itself did not give way to a foreign cultural practice known as the
areto. This displacement only occurred on the level of the signiers: the
Tano linguistic signier areto attempted to displace, or perhaps simply
augment, the Nahuatl signier mitote while the referent remained the
same (or at least maintained a continuity with its past). For Europeans, this
difference may be merely academic because it produces the same homogenizing effect. But for indigenous Americans and mestizos, the use of the foreign signiers to refer to their own cultural practices with long traditions
indicates a submission to the hegemony of colonial linguistic practice.
The analysis presented here has focused on the displacement and
stereotyping of indigenous culture that occurred in the semiotic domain.
Objections to this type of anticolonial or postcolonial analysis often claim
that it neglects the material conditions of colonization. It is important to
note that the use of indigenous Caribbean terms such as areto to refer to
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other indigenous American cultural practices and concepts does not represent in and of itself a colonization or even hybridization of material culture,
but rather the effect of a semiotic homogenization (mimicry and stereotype) based upon ethnocentric cognitive and epistemic processes. Most
late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexicans were probably not even
aware of the Caribbean origin of the word areto, and the mere use of the
term certainly did not change the nature of their cultural activities. Of
course, such objections must be addressed on a case-by-case basis, but I
would argue that the semiotic phenomena that I have discussed are intimately related to the material processes that resulted in the destruction,
disappearance, or radical transformation of indigenous societies. In other
words, the colonial project is as much a linguistic process as it is an economic and political one.
The use of stereotyping terms by Europeans and indigenous writers
represents what James Lockhart somewhat awkwardly labels double mistaken identity in which relationships of similarity based upon common
denominators of two distinct sociocultural phenomena lead each culture to
equate a foreign practice or concept with its own (1985, 477). In Oviedos
text there is no indigenous Caribbean subject that might have misread
his description of the areto. But the very possibility of such a misreading
constitutes the condition of possibility not only of Oviedos description but
of any description at all. Oviedos endeavor to describe Caribbean culture
to his European audience confronts the language of the other and attempts
to translate it into a more familiar idiom. At an empirical level, he achieves
his purpose, but transcendentally his effort illustrates the impossibility of
such a translation. As Derrida explains, language is never ones own, but
rather always the language of the other: language is for the other, coming
from the other, the coming of the other (1998, 68). In Oviedos text, the
language of the other manifests itself at two different levels. First, at the
empirical level, the indigenous term areto itself belongs to a language of
another, to Tano. In this sense, Oviedo literally employs the empirical language of an other, in spite of the fact that the other to whom he addresses
his text is European rather than Caribbean. On a transcendental level, however, it makes no difference that Oviedo employs terms from two different
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NOTES
1. For an extensive discussion of indigenous American modes of expression, see the collection of essays in Writing without Words (1994), ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter
Mignolo.
2. Most New World writers faced with the marvelous reality of America often explained
that what they had seen or experienced was so wonderful or strange or diabolical, etc.
that they had not the words to express it. This recourse is so common that it can be
termed a topos. For an explanation of topoi in general, see Ernst Robert Curtiuss
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1990), chapter 5. One need only scan
writings from the New World to notice this rhetorical device: see Cristbal Coln,
Textos y documentos completos (1982); Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de los
sucesos de la conquista de la Nueva Espaa (1983); and Bartolom de Las Casas, Brevsima
relacin de la destruccin de las Indias (1995).
3. For an overview and examples of the marvelous real, see Alejo Carpentiers essay The
Baroque and the Marvelous Real (1995) and novels El reino de este mundo (1978) and
Los pasos perdidos (1995). For magical realism, see Parkinson Zamora and Faris,
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995), and Gabriel Garca Mrquezs
novel Cien aos de soledad (1993).
4. I thank Edward H. Friedman for suggesting the phrase double metonymy to
describe this phenomenon.
5. Diccionario de la Lengua Espaola. Madrid: Real Academia Espaola., s.v. areito. (Voz
tana.) m. Ant. Canto y danza populares de los antiguos indios de las Grandes Antillas
en sus estas. Se extendi la voz para otras estas en otros lugares del continente.
6. The word mitote derives from the reexive form of the Nahuatl verb to dance, mihtotia.
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